Popcorn Perspectives with Danny Minton
Week of February 9, 2026
Crime 101
Rated R for sexual material/nudity, language throughout, and some violence
No Rotten Tomatoes Score at time of writing
In Theaters
Thor, Hulk, Catwoman and the new Joker (Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Halle Berry and Barry Keoghan) team up in this new crime thriller about a criminal with a heart of gold (Hemsworth) who is stealing jewelry along the 101 Highway in California in order to make enough money to retire a rich young man. But when a cop (Ruffalo) begins to hunt him and a young, ambitious fellow criminal (Keoghan) begins to steal his future heist gigs, he is forced to make some big choices about his theft career. The first thing you’ll notice is that you couldn’t ask for a better cast. The ensemble here is solid and their characters are complex enough that you can understand why they wanted to play them. And they all do a good enough job. They are all believable and compelling. So the biggest question arises from why is the film so blah? Perhaps it’s the horrific title, which makes a little more sense once you understand that it’s named after U.S. Route 101 and not a crime class, but the very play on that is cheesy at best. Maybe it’s because the pacing is a bit of a bore. Maybe it’s because it wants so badly to be like other crime thrillers, that its overall familiarity hurts its likability. Whatever it is, the film just never comes together like it should, giving us a film that is not bad, but also not great. It falls right in the middle. You won’t hate that you spent the money on it, but you’ll wish you had waited until it was streaming. While I won’t give too much away here, the ending is a complete cop out and changing that could have fixed the entire project. Writer/director Bart Layton’s vision for his characters is so far out of reality that it throws you off, and not in a good, you-won’t-see-it-coming kind of way. C+